Where is the best place to get a sales person?

I can't recommend anyone personally, but I would recommend you only go with a sales team that someone you know has used because I have heard of a number of scam company that are quick to take your money but not quick to gain results in this field.

I'd consider targeted advertising first.

It sounds like you know who your ideal customer would be. Maybe finding ways to advertise directly to them would be more direct.

Like direct mail or a leaflet drop?

An interesting proposal. It has got me thinking thanks

I do know my the people I want to target but the sales person would work on comission so I wouldn't lose money.

Hi James

It seems this question is part of business evolution, what you want is a superb salesperson who is going to generate you new business, but you don't want to pay him anything, other than commission on new business generated.

It sounds perfect, and I used to think exactly the same

The reality that I found is that superb salesmen know they are superb, and have superb salaries plus commission.

That leaves newbies and youngsters with no experience, and you will spend most of your time spoon feeding or chasing when they go radio silent.

Also recruited through an agency and although they gave us some sales guys, it was nothing to write home about, and even offering 60% commission, we found people unreliable and overall hardwork.

Reality is, if you want a genuine sales guy, then get him onboard with a base salary, and a decent commission structure if he meets his targets.

I share your pain about having no enthusiasm to do it yourself, but as much as I hated making sales calls, there is no better opportunity for a business owner to get direct feedback from your customers, and allowing you to experiment with pitches and price points as your business evolves.

With the knowledge gained between us, this then allowed us to take on fulltime sales guys, and set realistic expectations.

In the end though, we moved away from cold calls, and ended up with a far higher and more cost effective conversion rate from a well crafted adwords campaign and SEO than we ever did from sales agents or sales staff.

But if you do find any and they do really well for you, then best of luck

Another issue with getting part time sales support in is that if someone calls back, your colleague may not be in to take the call. We tried outsourcing a sales position before but it is much better to have someone who is a part of the business as they will not only be able to sell it to others better but will also be more motivated to do so.

I agree with some of the other comments here regarding targeted marketing and SEO as people seem to be so turned off to sales calls, even good ones!

I agree that sales people need to be part of the business. Successful sales people need to be passionate about their products or service and their company. I ve outsourced sales activities before and you just dont that that passion.

Hi,

I am a newbie here so please do not crucify my first post.

I have worked in sales for the last 15 years over financial products and services and there is so much competition out there and so not necessarily will you be able to compete with all your competitors and going along the lines of paid on sale is the way a lot of Direct Marketing companies go now. i.e Talk Talk,Window sales people etc..

There are a few ways that I have found that can make you stand out at very little cost:
Leaflet distribution - As you are an IT Guru I would imagine you could design a quick leaflet on one of you software packages and then ask a local firm to print out say 1000 of these - it wont be that expensive to do this - Then the local paper boy or you can deliver these to your intended targets. As you are delivering them you may get people talking about it without the need of having much sles ability.
SEO - This is something that only you can decide whether it is worth doing as its usually a long winded process and can take alot of time to get to where you want to be.

If all else fails - you could get a telemarketing company in - They could contact a whole host of people that you could give them and then only pay for the successful ones together with a monthly fee of usually about

lol don't panic this isn't digital point... we save crucifiction for spammers